An Authentic Path to Wholeness
I want to share with you how and why I came to discover and become consciously whole. Becoming whole has little to do with my career and work experiences, primarily as an environmental planner over a 20 year period. I am no psychotherapist or life coach or director of a research or training organisation. I may not be in the upper echalons of personal change agents such as Echart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, or Gabor Mate but I have my own unique life path, full of holes and wounds and insecurities, that you and many others might relate to. If the idea of becoming whole attracts you, if navigating your way through the wounded worlds within and around you is important, then please read on. I may just be able to help you.
It was through immersive experiences in nature, following my NatureConnect approach, that I became aware of two aspects of wholeness: 1) the experience of being whole, enough and acknowledging and accepting of the parts of myself (the good, bad, and the ‘ugly’) and my life situation, and 2) the wholeness of the natural world i.e all the parts of a forest contributing to the health of the whole but arising from the whole (forest). Although I didn’t label these experiences, these insights as wholeness, I later realised the importance of wholeness via profound nature connection to my psychological and spiritual wellbeing.
Through reading the books about wholeness by the American educator Parker Palmer and American physicist David Bohm, as well as the commendation by my spirit guide, Michael (yes, a scientific oriented thinker can be spiritual too!), I recognised the usefulness of wholeness as a guiding idea and framework for coping with mental health, for becoming authentic and aligned to your total self, in understanding the nature of reality and identity, and for clarifying life direction issues. At the beginning of my exploratory journey, early 2020, I was in a dark hole, overwhelmed by confusion about life direction, feeling lost within myself, a broken relationship, and no-one to turn to.
So, in early 2020 with the arrival of the COVID 19 pandemic, I committed to getting my act together, to take responsibility for my unhappiness and lostness, and learn what it meant to become whole, to overcome my inner brokenness and fractured thinking. The circumstances were not ideal, surrounded by massive bushfires, then floods, then marriage breakdown, financial insecurity, autoimmune illness in my youngest son, social isolation, and moving home five times in five years. The etymology of whole means healing, and in these circumstances, I felt broken, anxious but yearning to be whole.
As I came to learn, brokenness or persistent emotional or psychological instability and fragility can be the conduit, the cracks in the armour that allows the light of self-understanding to filter through. It is feeling and relating into the wound that the healing can be experienced. I had been carrying my psychological armour, unconsciously so, all of my life, primarily to protect the fears, pain, insecurities and other wounds from childhood and earlier. A large part of becoming whole is awakening to this, to understand how your behaviours, thinking and feeling state patterns, and your pain and suffering in general, have been directed from these childhood adaptations and ensuing wounds. So I learnt all of this without guidance except my spirit friends and through research and contemplative, reflective practices. The book was part of this journey and the program I offer arises from the book and distilling my life and wholeness experiences.